An article published by the Financial Times on ‘The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable‘ refers to a paper by the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED) Director Professor Benjamin Sovacool on the pace of energy transitions. The piece argues that the transition to renewable energy has been disrupting entire industries, but there is still a way to go to solve climate change. The article discusses the recent academic debate on how quickly the transition to renewables can actually happen and refers to ‘How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions‘, the paper by Prof Sovacool in Energy Research and Social Science (ERSS) as a key exponent of the argument that the process does not always have to take decades.
The question of how quickly energy transitions can occur has been an important debate within CIED as well, with Dr Florian Kern and Dr Karoline Rogge also reacting to it in a short comment piece in ERSS titled ‘The pace of governed energy transitions: Agency, international dynamics and the global Paris agreement accelerating decarbonisation processes?‘. The project ‘Policy synergies and trade offs for low energy innovation‘ looks at energy transitions and the role of policy mixes in the process.
